Don't Look Now!
The past is RIGHT behind you
This past Monday I opened my college diaries, something I had not dared to do in 12 years. You know me,
, as such a hilarious, cheery, practically perfect woman, I know...but if you can believe it, I too have a past and it was not always so pretty! As I unearthed these pages and peered down at my sad (I mean SAD) scribbles, the ground began to shake. Like actually. Within 30 seconds, the entire city of New York was rumbling. Was I INSANE? Nope. New York was having an earthquake. Are my disturbed memories that powerful? STILL YET TO BE DETERMINED. I can't act like I didn't have something to do with it, I was clearly messing with some dark magic. The past is a powerful thing! It can define your life! It can cause you to pay for like years of therapy! It can make you do wild, wild things like continually own black labradors, over and over, because that's what everyone in your family has done forever--it's simply tradition--so now you've had so many black labradors, it's hard to tell them apart. Is this a photo of Dixie or Heart or Libby or Margie?? HARD TO SAY. God forbid they ever found out about each other!!
Jason Chatfield
On this day 4 years ago I remember complaining about not knowing what day it was, because weeks were stretching into months. Seasons didn't make sense anymore. The past and the future combined into one slipstream of horror, unfolding inexorably towards horizonless misery. Also, yes this is sort of also a Garfield reference.
Sarah Kempa
Past me is putting off things that haunt current me. Typical items included but not limited to are sending emails, completing to do lists, calling customer support, and/or canceling subscriptions.
Ellis Rosen
I get that if I go back in time, kill my grandfather, preventing my existence, making it impossible for me to go back in time in the first place, it's a paradox. That's fine. What makes my head hurt is when I smack it against the ceiling of The Time Machine.
Amy Kurzweil
I love the past. It's where we all came from, and it's were we're all going. That's right, the lamp in the above cartoon actually contains a genie, and the woman in the cartoon aka me just asked for a Mega Global Time Machine for her first wish (that's where we all go back in time, not just me), and now we're all rocketing toward the 90s, which is where all of my fashion choices and private sensibilities make sense. My second wish is for Ellis never to get a Time Machine, so he never went back in time and never killed his grandfather and never not existed (your welcome Ellis). And my third wish is for someone to cast a provisional invisibilty spell on the boxes of childhood ephemera in my parent's home, so my mother doesn't have to see them cluttering up her basement and I don't have to deal with the pain of parting with my nostalgia, which, in this case will be made especially weird by the fact that we're all globally back in time in the 90s, which is when most of those boxes and drawings and books and photo albums and dioramas originated. What happens to a paper mache cow when it time travels to its 1996 origins? Does it kill its own father?
Sarah Morrisette
This guy is out there reminding us that the end is NOT near. Instead, we need to remember the past, all the way, way back to the beginning--which may or may not have been a big bang. The past is there to remind us of the horrible and embarrasing mistakes we've made, so that we never make them again. It's also there to be cherished, like the thousands of photos you've taken which still need to be, ahem, properly sorted.
Navied Mahdavian
Between 18 and 21 I was vegan. I do not think about the meals I ate then.
Some more reminders that are currently in the present but soon to be in the past:
Hilary is hosting a Dance Party in Bushwick on May 9th!
Check out Navied Mahdavian’s critically acclaimed graphic memoir, This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America.
Amy Kurzweil l teaches cartoon classes on Patreon! Sign up now to get the recording of every past class!
Jason Chatfield has a new Substack about making art called Process Junkie!And Subscribe to Jason’s regular weekly Substack at NewYorkCartoons.com
Sofia Warren's got an advice column! Read it here.
Check out more of Sarah Morrisette's work here!